Around 150, Death Toll in Iraq Attack Among War’s Worst

Iraqis on Sunday inspected the site of a suicide bombing on Saturday in Amerli, north of Baghdad, in which about 150 people were killed.Credit
Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BAGHDAD, July 8 — The death toll from a suicide truck bombing in a remote village in northern Iraq rose to around 150 on Sunday, making it one of the deadliest single bombings, if not the deadliest, since the 2003 invasion.

The attack, in the impoverished Shiite Turkmen village of Amerli, 100 miles north of Baghdad in Salahuddin Province, has highlighted fears that Sunni insurgents facing military crackdowns in Baghdad and Diyala Province are simply directing their attacks to areas outside the concentration of American troops.

The police in Amerli said that the truck used in Saturday’s attack concealed 4.5 tons of explosives beneath watermelons. The blast leveled dozens of houses and shops, trapping and killing many residents beneath the rubble.

Casualty counts conflicted. Some officials put the toll between 130 and 150, but Col. Abbas Mohammed Ameen, the police commander of Tuz Khurmato, a town about 15 miles away, said the toll was 155 dead and 265 wounded.

Tahsin Kahea, a member of the provincial council and a prominent member of the Turkmen community, said he believed that the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and religious extremists had “started to attack the Shiite towns outside the main cities after they have been suffocated in Baghdad and Diyala.”

Photo

Bombs were hidden under watermelons in the attack in Amerli.Credit
The New York Times

“This happened previously in Daquq, Tal Afar and Bashir, and now in Amerli,” he said.

The American ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, and Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the American forces in Iraq, issued a joint statement on Sunday in which they condemned the attack, praised the Iraqi security and emergency services, and promised to help the investigation. “We send our thoughts and prayers to the victims’ families and those injured,” the statement said. “This attack is another sad example of the nature of the enemy and their use of indiscriminate violence to kill innocent citizens.”

Near the town of Haswa, about 30 miles west of Baghdad, another suicide truck bomber killed more than 20 new Iraqi Army recruits and wounded 27 others on Sunday, Iraqi security officials said.

They said the recruits were killed as they were being driven to a recruitment center in Baghdad from Anbar Province. They were joining the Iraqi security forces as part of a drive by Sunni tribal leaders to fight the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, which had seized control of some areas of the overwhelmingly Sunni province.

Two nearly simultaneous car-bomb blasts on Sunday in the eastern Baghdad neighborhood of Karrada killed at least eight Iraqis and wounded 12, the United States military said.

On the outskirts of Amerli on Sunday, fluttering black flags bore the names of the dead — in some cases more than half a dozen from a single family.

In the middle of the sprawl of rubble that was once the town center, a 12-foot crater gaped. Villagers said 50 houses and 55 shops had been destroyed and scores more badly damaged, with debris piled alongside shattered buildings — a testament to where rescuers, their efforts now ended, had tried to dig out survivors. The town has been cut off from electricity and water since the blast.

The village’s medical services — one small treatment center — were immediately overwhelmed after the attack, and many of the wounded were sent to Tuz Khurmato, Kirkuk and Sulaimaniya. Some were even flown to Turkey.

Photo

A woman walked past one of two locations of car bombings in the Karrada neighborhood in eastern Baghdad on Sunday. The nearly simultaneous explosions killed eight Iraqis and wounded 12 others.Credit
Hadi Mizban/Associated Press

The governor of Salahuddin Province, Hamed Hamoud, arrived along with his police commander to console residents on Sunday. But the villagers refused to meet with them, instead throwing stones and cursing them for failing to protect Amerli.

As he arrived at work in Amerli on Sunday, Imad Abdul Hussein, a policeman, said: “I came to do my job and to take revenge for my uncle killed yesterday. We will fight Al Qaeda organization to the last drop of our blood; we will destroy them or they will destroy us.”

No group claimed immediate responsibility for the attack, but Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, leader of the jihadist group Islamic State in Iraq, issued an audiotape warning Iran to stop supporting Iraq’s Shiites. The tape, posted on a Web site, said, “We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two-month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention.” He added, “Otherwise, a severe war is waiting for you.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

The attack on Amerli came 12 hours after a blast in a Shiite-dominated farming district in neighboring Diyala Province, close to the Iranian border. That attack, in Zakoosh, killed 17 people, and came as further evidence of the bombers’ ability to attack outside Baghdad and Baquba, where tens of thousands of American troops have been waging an offensive to reduce insurgent activity.

American commanders conceded that 80 percent of the insurgents’ leadership in Baquba evaded the siege and are thought to have escaped the city.

It is rare for insurgents to mount such large attacks in remote villages like Amerli, often preferring to strike in crowded city centers and at religious sites and Iraqi security forces. But since the start of the Baghdad security plan in February, they have frequently struck outside the capital within major cities or targets that are less well defended.

In May, for instance, two truck-bomb attacks in the Kurdish region — including one in the center of Erbil — killed at least 69 people. In April, two suicide car bombings about two weeks apart killed 42 and 71 people well south of the capital, near Shiite shrines in the holy city of Karbala. A month earlier a double car bombing in the Shiite town of Hilla killed 90 pilgrims, with 28 more killed elsewhere on the same day.

All these bombings came after the Feb. 14 start of the new Baghdad security plan, which brought tens of thousands more American troops into the city as part of the latest crackdown aimed at restoring order to the capital.

Alissa J. Rubin contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Amerli and Baghdad.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Around 150, Death Toll in Iraq Attack Among War’s Worst. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe